Power-Time Tradeoff of Parallel Execution on Multi-core Platforms

It is anticipated that high-performance handheld multi-core devices will be used as WSN processing nodes in the near future. Reducing execution time by deploying parallel applications on multi-core platforms comes at the cost of increasing power consumption compared to using fewer cores. This paper focuses on such tradeoff between power consumption and execution time and subsequently achieves maximal energy saving when executing applications in parallel. Based on the experiments on a multi-core platform, we can verify that parallel execution with frequency scaling is an effective approach at the application level in order to reduce energy consumption.